Two recent reviews compared School of Deaths to the Harry
Potter series. I decided to play on that a bit with this question: are
writers like Voldemort?

I say YES.

The first similarity is that both writers and Voldemort use magic.
Voldemort’s magic mostly involves torturing and killing people.
He seems especially obsessed with a teenage boy, and finds ways
to get into the boy’s mind. A writer also uses
magic. Writers use a group of arcane symbols arranged into
clumps they call words. Like a spell, they can take an image,
something that only exists as a slight fancy in their imagination, and
dump it into the imaination of their reader. As I type, an
elephant walked in front of my window stinking of manure. Did
you picture an elephant, or smell manure? What if I then told
you there was no elephant? That transference is the most real
form of magic imaginable….

“Writing is magic.” – Stephen King,On Writing

Another striking similarity is in what both writers and Voldemort
want: eternal life. Voldemort is obsessed with the idea of
immortality. He kills people to create horcruxes, ironially
causing his own downfall and death, when one of the horcruxes fights
back. Writers are no different. It’s true that many might
simply want to share their ideas, but in the end, by creating stories
that will endure, a writer has taken part of their soul and created
something eternal: a part of their soul that can be shared in
another’s mind, and could last forever. Sounds a lot like making
horcruxes- only without all the murders.